I’ve been keeping an eye out for a range of texts (‘literary’ and ‘pop culture’) that I can use in lessons with preservice English teachers. I’m looking for things that are interesting texts in their own right, as well as can shed some light on an important aspect of secondary education or English curriculum.

My find for today is: Mary Poppins (1964)

In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun –
you find the fun and snap!
The job’s a game!

There are certainly conflicting discourses in the song though – I’d love to take an extract from 1984 to compare and contrast here, the one where Orwell describes how the proles are kept in line through pop music and the lottery…

‘a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down’ (eek!?)

Another one of my favourite songs from the movie (and no, I’m not generally a fan of musicals) and another that I think bears exploration is the Chiminey Sweep song. I’ll let you do your own reading of that one!

Chim chiminey
Chim chiminey
Chim chim cher-oo!
Good luck will rub off when
I shake ‘ands with you
Or blow me a kiss
And that’s lucky too

Now as the ladder of life
‘As been strung
You may think a sweep’s
On the bottommost rung

Though I spends me time
In the ashes and smoke
In this ‘ole wide world
There’s no ‘appier bloke

Up where the smoke is
All billered and curled
‘Tween pavement and stars
Is the chimney sweep world

When the’s ‘ardly no day
Nor ‘ardly no night
There’s things ‘alf in shadow
And ‘alf way in light
On the roof tops of London
Coo, what a sight!

I choose me bristles with pride
Yes, I do
A broom for the shaft
And a broom for the flume

Stepping it up this week a bit in the ‘modelling-best-practice’ stakes…

It occured to me that as I am advocating the importance of studying texts and their traditions to…well basically, the development of human society as we know it, that I’m not doing enough of this in my own university classes.

Last week I got a real buzz relating the theoretical material in this unit to contemporary texts and practices, namely to the story of Terminator II and to the ‘Pirates vs Ninjas’ meme. So this week I am using another text as a way to relate to theory, this time going into even more depth.

I have chosen the film Pleasantville. I am going to use this film to explore ‘critical literacy’ and interrogate the resistance to critical reading of text in secondary English.

My message in the coming weeks will be to embrace ‘workshops’ as well as individual and group ‘project based learning’ as alternative approaches to lesson organisation. I want them to start thinking about how we traditionally do “class” and what learning experiences are encouraged there. As I’m electing to ‘put my money where my mouth is’ this week I suppose I should give them a taste of this too…but what to do?

Perhaps I will split the two hours into a ‘workshop’ and a ‘project’. Will I have time for both? I’d like to also screen the first ~20 minutes of the film in class, giving me 30 minutes for the rest of the workshop.

That leaves ~50 minutes for students to complete a seperate project. But what?

This study investigated the relationship between students’ motivation and their participation in asynchronous online discussions during a 16-week online course. Fifty-six students participated in
online discussion activities as a normal part of their classes. Their motivation for participating in online discussions was self-reported three times throughout the semester. The findings continue to
indicate that students’ motivation has a significant relationship with their participation in online discussion activities at time two and time three. Students’ perceived value, autonomy, competence,
and relatedness have different levels of impact on their online discussion behavior. This study also found that students’ intrinsic motivation and their perceived value of online discussions remained at a moderate-high level over time, although the perceived value had a significant drop from the midpoint to the end of the semester.

Of the roughly 85 students in my English Curriculum Studies unit, currently about 62 are following our class twitter account @CLB_018

No mean feat considering it is only week 4.

However, it is week 4 of a 9 week unit, meaning we’re almost half way done (eek! I still have so much to SAY!)

Aaaand, I’m aware that a small handful of those followers may be spamish.

So today I am embarking on a twit hunt – hunting through my list of followers to see who has not tweeted anything (many only joined for class and only follow the class profile). I’m going to DM each of them individually and privately to encourage them to participate.

Am I going overboard in doing this?

On one hand this looks exactly like the kind of time-consuming ‘tech monitoring’ that teachers often tell me they don’t like about teaching online.

On the other hand, I see it as analogous to checking students’ workbooks a few weeks in to term and pointing out their missing work. Is this something that University teachers see as beyond the scope of their ‘job’? I don’t.

But please – please – tell me if you think this is too much, or if this seems like a good strategy to you. Especially if you do something similar – did it work?

Let’s make sure we’re applying the ‘too much is too much’ rule across the board, and not just as an excuse/a reason for neglecting the new. If what we mean is ‘we haven’t had enough PD to use this right’ then by all means say that. But there are some things that would be good to drop out of our current practice to make room for the new. One thing that we know about teaching is that no matter what you are taught to do, as a teacher you will instinctively model your practice on the teaching you received at school. Fighting against this instinct takes concentration, and learning about new practices and tools takes a lot of work. Because of this, teachers who are embracing technology are feeling increasingly overloaded and burnt out – this is the real problem that needs managing.

…as educational leaders, if we want to help people come to terms with change and embrace it, then we need to recognise and validate their desire to stick with ‘the known’…Recognising that people are resisting change because they feel disempowered helps us to employ methods that give power back.

These lines of thinking manifested in the lecture I gave today to preservice English teachers on how to navigate change amidst all of the ‘theories of text and response’ that they had learned so far.

It was interesting to follow the tweets of @BiancaH80 and @durk94 tonight, as they discussed the school funding data available on the MySchool website.

To be honest, in the interests of keeping myself in a positive and generative work state of mind I’ve avoided looking at the new MySchool site at all (and no, I’m not going to hyperlink to it because I don’t think it deserves the traffic). Next week I’m going to have to though, so I can talk about it with my students in class.

ohmmmmmmm…

Even though I now work at a university, which involves striving for curriculum excellence in schools in every sector, I maintain my firm commitment to the social justice agenda of supporting public education.

However, government departments of education tend to be clunky, inefficient, wheel-reinventing institutions. I know, I used to work in one. And if I returned to teaching you’d find me back there.

But while funding and resource benchmarks are a large part of the problem, a widespread lack of willingness to consider radically shifting our models of curriculum ‘delivery’ prevents the construction of a meaningful way forward, in my opinion. The composition of the local student ‘community’ and its relationship to the related local ‘campus’ needs to be significantly rethought.

So I’m posting my tweets for tonight up here, just for the record. I’d be interested in hearing other people’s visions for the school campus of the future. Will there still be a distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’?